IGN - Editors' Most Anticipated of 2007

January 24th, 2007, 03:42

IGN has kicked up a feature titled Editors&#39; Most Anticipated PC Games of 2007, with three different editors nominating 10 projects. Several games we cover were mentioned, including The Witcher, Bioshock, a couple of MMOGs and Dragon Age:

We&#39;ve been waiting to see this one for so long that we&#39;re nauseous with hunger. BioWare is finally building a game for the PC again and the consoles can&#39;t have it! Considering the games these guys have put out recently, it&#39;s hard not to be at least a little hyped up about wandering a new fictional universe that has been in the works for years. There&#39;s a lot still to find out about this game, but we&#39;ve been told BioWare is hoping it will be out in 2007 so it&#39;s on our list.

Dan's description of BioShock's genre was pretty funny, while the others just refer to it as a shooter, especially considering some of the topics around here.
"Adventure/RPG/First-person Shooter/Creepy Girl Simulator/Puzzle/Awesome Water Renderer"

Of all the titles only one I will be skipping is Jericho, not so much becase I don't like horror, just not Clive Barker.
After Undying where the game by all reports was near completion GLucas decided to pull in Clive Barker to give the game some punch.
According to CBarker's interviews and his site his contributions were changing the PC to an attractive male he would want to sleep with, some of the art and writings.
The problem I have is his dea, his name go out in front of the title, basicly usurping/stealing all the credit for an almost complete game.

I would have much rather played the original, than one that has some guy's gay fantasies added.
Those devs at DreamCatcher didn't get a bit of credit and it annoys the hell out of me.

— Trust me, most of the names I have been called you can't translate in any language…they're not even real words as much as a succession of violent images.

Can someone confirm something for me about Dragon Age? I could swear when the concept behind the game first came out, they talked very specifically about a more "realistic" setting than D&D, and a different kind of magic system which made more sense physically, and especially that there would be no resurrection under any circumstances because it just didn't make sense.

Then a few weeks ago I read that no party NPC's could die, a la NWN2 they could only be knocked out. I HATE HATE HATE those kinds of arbitrary restrictions.

I always felt in NWN2, despite being the "Chosen One" (a concept I'm sure will still be fresh for another 20 or 30 years), that the game was more about the NPC's, like I was tagging along in their quite interesting and adventurous lives. In fact, if you took away the party members' quests I doubt you could even call it a game.

It is interesting how much they focused on the 'boy we hope it makes 2007' items. And having a game like STALKER that has been delayed and feature-trimmed to the point of being on the list 'for curiosity' … I hope it is good, but it left my 'most watched' list ages ago …

Originally Posted by screeg
Then a few weeks ago I read that no party NPC's could die, a la NWN2 they could only be knocked out. I HATE HATE HATE those kinds of arbitrary restrictions.

Why? I mean, if the game is made for a party of 4 then it will be next to impossible to complete if your party members die along the way and then you're left with no choice but to reload.

I remember back when I first played Monkey Island and realized that unlike the Sierra adventure games of the time where you spent more time reloading after you'd died than actually playing the game, here was a game where you couldn't die. You could concentrate on playing the game instead of saving for each step to avoid redoing too much when you had to reload.

If it is about immersion I would suggest that constant reloads are worse "immersion breakers" than knocked out party members that wake up after the battle but perhaps that's just me.

— "Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves."- Commander Vimes in Thud! by Terry Pratchett

Originally Posted by fatBastard()
If it is about immersion I would suggest that constant reloads are worse "immersion breakers" than knocked out party members that wake up after the battle but perhaps that's just me.

I fully agree with this. You're just going to reload the game anyways.

Originally Posted by doctor_kaz
I fully agree with this. You're just going to reload the game anyways.

Yep, me too. If one of my NPCs dies during a battle, I'm just going to reload on the spot — end of story.

With the unconcious system, I play on and I have the (temporary) consequences of being a man down for the battle. I actually find it more exciting to finish the battle with one man standing (knowing everyone will get up in a minute, of course) than always reloading on the spot.

So why were resurrections discontinued?
Was it too compliacated, or did it give the player too much choice as in "Forget that jerk, we're not rezzin him" and effect minor plot points?
[Bishop comes to mind in NWN2]

To bad really, in crappy games like say, obflibion during the Fighter Guild quest where you forced to do something "obviously" stupid so they devs could force some, precieved dramatic tragidy when like some many other quest it's just bad writing, I enjoy being rebelous so I went back and Rezz'd them.

— Trust me, most of the names I have been called you can't translate in any language…they're not even real words as much as a succession of violent images.

I dont know crap about Dragon Age, I know I should being a fan of everything Bioware, but I just havent paid any attention to it. By the time the Bioware gets ahold of me and shows me just why I need this game, I suppose that I'll be chomping at the bit to play it all in due time. I'm ready guys, start thrilling me already, youre at a disadvantage from the get-go because it doesnt have D&D stamped all over it.

STALKER has fallen off my radar, and Conan for some reason doesnt excite me. It should, I love Howard, and I live a life drenched in fantasy metal music and imagery, but the word MMO is a dirty one for me at this time. Barbarians talking in leet speak is ironically appropriate, but for some reason the thought of a Conan MMO just leaves an icky taste in my brain. I know Spore is supposed to be just so innovative and sensational, but it just looks like a game that I should be able to download for 19.99 somewhere. It's novel, colorful, fun, mutated stuff. So was Impossible Creatures, for like 45 minutes.

No interest in anything to do with Quake, Half Life, Unreal, or Crysis. Myst? I'm all for nostalgia, but gag me w/ a ginsu. Gal Civ=Pure TBS Tedium, been there/done that and subsequently slipped into a coma for a week. no thx. WWII, PLEASE no thx, if I kill one more nazi Im going to start feeling sorry for the guys. Hitler is dead. I think weve gotten even by now. Next

Giant robots in RTS suck, Supreme Commander, just letting you know beforehand. Speaking of which, I am predicting that this Supreme Commander game that everyone is (and has been) salivating over for what seems like freakin eons is going to blow big time, big robots and all. Oh I know, it has this/that/the other thing and is made by him/him/ and him. Sometimes you just gotta go with your gut feeling, and this is my gut feeling. That's my prediction, thanks for calling. A submarine sim? Maybe when I was like 7 years old. Oh plz, make it stop, the pain the pain!

2007 looks bleak.

Not really, it's late, Im a bit cranky. It finally looks like the year that I'm going to actually save money on games for once, tho. I'm finally going to catch up! I have a backlog of games that I havent already finished and been saturated with like Spellforce II, Age of Empires III, Nosferatu, Rome:Total War, Icewind Dale Collection, Oblivion, NWN II, Fate, Winter Assault/Dark Crusade, Freedom Force vs 3rd Reich, and good old faithful FastCrawl.

Originally Posted by Corwin
I agree also, though in Monkey Island, my absolute favourite part is when you fall off the cliff and the Sierra death screen comes up!! I felt sick as I hadn't saved for hours!!

And then fly back up over the death message as the music changes? Yeah, that was pretty fantastic.

Dragon Age is (outsider view — I haven't been on DA in more than a year, although my wife works on it) meant to be "realistic" in the sense that, yeah, there's magic, but we're not talking Eberron or Forgotten Realms, where the beggar still has a +1 dagger to defend himself with and the best smiths use dragonfire to power their forges. (That's an amalgam of two complaints, really — "too much magic" in Eberron, with the trains and airships, and "everyone too powerful" in Faerun.)

From memory and without getting myself fired, the magic PCs will have access to includes powerful elemental magic (that will freak out the peasants who see it), but not, say, raising the dead or teleporting or, you know, any of the stuff that would easily break a computer game. Think Conan, but with the sorcerers SLIGHTLY less likely to be automatically evil, or "A Song of Ice and Fire" closer to book three than book one, and done in video-game format.

Again, I repeat, that's the view of the guy who hasn't been there for awhile. I don't THINK it's gonna be "All magic, all the time!" by the time it ships, but some of that could change, or I could just be blissfully wrong.

In BG2 (and PS:T, I think), my biggest aggravation wasn't having to raise people. They got rid of "lose a level of Con point when you die", so that was okay. No, it was having to re-equip the person who'd just died after they dropped all the heaps of equipment they'd been wearing and carrying.

If you want "realistic", you're far more likely to be knocked unconscious with a nonlethal wound than you are to be killed outright. And from a story standpoint, if you're trying to tell any kind of complex story that involves the followers (and DA is trying to do this in a big way), it's hard enough to do that without factoring in how many followers might have died because the PC was too cheap to spring for a resurrection.

Why I hate having to Res!! When you need it the most (early on) you don't have the money; if you have to find a temple, or healer, you waste tons of game time travelling etc; collecting and re-equipping stuff from the corpse; stat or exp losses!!